Researchers examined the level of racial discrimination in the United States labor market by randomly assigning identical résumés black-sounding or white-sounding names and observing the impact on requests for interviews from employers. Results found that résumés with white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks than those with black-sounding names, indicating that, all other things being equal, considerable racial discrimination exists in the American labor market.

Researchers studied hiring discrimination among major employers in the United States by sending fictional resumes, with varying demographic information, to determine whether certain characteristics would lead to different follow-up contact rates. Employers were less likely to contact resumes with distinctively Black names than resumes with distinctively white names.